Wednesday, July 25, 2012

I was really excited about seeing Brave. It’s Pixar’s
first movie with a female main character. It takes place in Scotland. The
heroine has the most awesome hair I’ve ever seen (even prettier than Ariel’s).
Also Disney blah blah blah…I’m a fan.

But I didn’t love Brave. In fact, if I’m being
honest, I didn’t like it all that much. Especially not when you factor in my
expectations. Usually, when I see a Disney or Pixar movie, I want to see it
again as soon as it’s over. I saw Up in the theater THREE TIMES. I saw Tangled
in 3-D, ridiculous price be damned. When Brave ended, it ended. I don’t have
any desire to see it again. It had a lot of good qualities. It was visually
stunning, occasionally funny, occasionally moving, the voice work was
excellent, and again the HAIR, but it just didn’t grab me.

With the exception of one scene.

About halfway through the movie, the heroine Merida
stumbles upon a witch. This witch lives in a
cottage in the middle of the woods, is obsessed with wood-carving, and has a
pet raven. She’s a crazy old lady with a crooked back and wild hair who makes
vague references to the “Wicker Man festival.” She and Merida have an exchange,
deals are made, et cetera. I don’t want to spoil anything so I won’t get too
detailed, but I LOVED this character. I would have happily watched a whole
movie about her, and when Merida first arrived at her house I got really
excited because I thought I knew what was coming.

As a writer, I have a bad habit of making up the
whole movie in my head before I see it or as I’m seeing it. Then when the movie
doesn’t turn out to be the one I wrote, I get mad. When Merida met the witch, I
wrote the rest of Brave in about 30 seconds. This was easy because it was “The
Sword in the Stone with girls!” Imagine that shrieked in a voice only dogs can
hear and you’ll be close to the sounds I made in my head.

I love The Sword in the Stone. I was obsessed with
it as a kid, more so than any other Disney movie at the time. It’s one of those
movies that indirectly rerouted the course of my life. It’s a pretty well-known story, but I like summarizing
things so…

The movie opens by
telling us that long ago “when England was young” the king died without leaving
an heir. Consequently, a sword stuck into a stone literally fell out of the sky
with an inscription saying whoever can pull out the sword will be king. Nobody
could, and England fell into chaos. Years later, a lonely abused orphan named
Arthur stumbles into the cottage of the wizard Merlin who becomes his mentor. Thanks
to Merlin’s guidance, Arthur manages to pull out the sword and becomes King
Arthur.

Naturally, I knew Merida wasn’t going to pull a
sword out of a stone (it is, after all, NO basis for a system of government),
but I thought/hoped the witch would become her mentor, maybe teach her some witchcraft
or a little Latin. But no. That wasn’t the movie I got, so I had to go home and
watch The Sword in the Stone again. And then it occurred to me why Brave didn’t
want to steal its plot.

The Sword in the Stone is not that good.

It’s not the first time I’ve come to this
conclusion. I come to it pretty much every time I watch it, but still. It
always makes me sad because I used to love it SO MUCH. I’m going to list the reasons why it’s not
good because you care (obviously) and because it’s healthy.

-Most of the animators were on autopilot and it shows.
The animation is terrible. Well, maybe not terrible, but it’s dull and sloppy. Hold
it up next to Sleeping Beauty and you will feel physical pain.

- It barely follows the excellent book that inspired
it.

- It has no plot. It just rambles along at a
sluggish pace from one scene to the next.

- Arthur’s voice. The kid who played Arthur went
through puberty while the movie was being made and his voice changed. Rather
than rerecord the whole movie with a different actor, the director had his TWO
sons fill in gaps here and there. It did not help at all. Three boys—all at
various stages of puberty—voiced one character. And it’s really obvious.

-The ending is way too abrupt and…

-At the end of the day, it’s just kind of boring.

Yeah.

And yet, there are a lot of things about it I love:
the Sherman Brothers songs, Archimedes the talking owl, the villain Madam Mim
and her subsequent duel with Merlin. Oh, I love Madam Mim so much. Especially
when you consider that in book, Madam Mim is 30, beautiful and basically a
pedophile, but in the movie she’s a gleefully sadistic old hag. If the movie’s Madam
Mim and Merlin had a baby, she would grow up to be the witch in Brave.

Also two scenes in The Sword in the Stone give me
chills literally every time I watch them. The opening song, which has no title
and tells the story of the king’s death and how the sword appeared, is
beautiful. It’s one of my favorite moments of any movie, especially at “IN
LONDON TOWN.” I’ve cried just listening to it. The other is at the end when
Arthur has to prove to everyone that he pulled out the sword by pulling it out
again. He walks confidently to the stone, and as soon as he touches the sword,
a light surrounds him and celestial music starts playing. He looks up and pulls
out the sword with no trouble. Because HE’S the chosen one. There’s a reason
that moment shows up in a lot of “Best of Disney” montages, even though the
rest of the movie is lackluster. There’s something very satisfying about it.

Conveniently, some lovely person posted these two scenes
together on YouTube.

The Sword in the Stone is my go-to example for why labels
like “boys’ movies” and “girls’ movies” don’t mean a thing. There are four
female characters and half of them are squirrels, but I didn’t care. It moved
me in a very real way. I related to Arthur and when he becomes king at the end,
his victory felt like possible. If fantasy is metaphor then the sword in the
stone represents finding the inner strength you need to overcome whatever’s
holding you back. That’s actually one way the movie improves on the book and
even the legend itself. In the legend, Arthur is able to pull the sword out of
the stone because (unbeknownst to him) he is the late king’s son, raised in
secret by a foster family. In the movie, we never know why he’s the chosen one.
He just is.

If you tell me The Sword in the Stone is dull and sloppily made, I won’t disagree, but I will be quick to say it still had a major positive
impact on me. It got me into the Arthurian legend, which I eventually studied
in college. I might not have read T. H. White without it and I definitely
wouldn’t have read Le Morte d’Arthur. I might never have met my fairy godmother,
Morgan le Fay (she’s so badass, she picked up witchcraft in a nunnery. How does
that even HAPPEN?) It inspired most of what I wrote as a kid and still inspires
my writing now. Even during other movies obviously. There are Disney films I
LOVED as a kid that I can’t stand now (including one I’ll be writing about soon),
but The Sword in the Stone is not one of them.

I’m sure there are a lot of kids who saw Brave and
loved it. These kids were no doubt perfectly happy they saw the movie Pixar made
and not some slapped-together ripoff about the witch and Merida and all their
wacky adventures. Maybe some of these kids will continue to watch Brave as they
grow up and eventually notice the weak story and undeveloped characters. However,
they probably won’t care. Maybe, poisoned by nostalgia, they’ll love Brave unapologetically
all their lives. I certainly wouldn’t blame them.

What Would Go In the Description if I Were One of the American Girl Dolls

I'm a writer, formerly of New Jersey, living and working in NYC. My short stories have been published in Dark Moon Digest Issues 1, 4, 12, and Dark Moon Digest Presents Ghosts. I am studying the fine art of Improv Comedy. I enjoy animation, fairy tales and breaking the fourth wall. I know how to say "My mother can't eat pork. She is allergic" in German, but I must be paid first (this is negotiable).